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Workforce Optimization as a ServiceVirtual Observer is available as a cloud-based, SaaS offering, available for a an affordable subscription rate which falls in line with our "lowest cost of ownership" philosophies.

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Workforce Optimization as a ServiceVirtual Observer is available as a cloud-based, SaaS offering, available for a an affordable subscription rate which falls in line with our "lowest cost of ownership" philosophies.

Tag Archives: workforce optimization

The contact center industry has fundamentally changed as communications have gone digital: the number of voice interactions is on track to be supplanted by the total number of other interactions – such as email, web chat and social – by the end of 2016. [1]

Be ready, because more channels are coming! Many people may not think of Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp as primary communication channels, but combined these two platforms have nearly 2 billion users. In the future these platforms may very well be how people prefer to communicate.

This creates a challenge for the contact center industry to adapt. Unfortunately, this has meant that some have had separate software or devices for each modality. “Think of how little sense it makes to force (and train) users to use one software for calls, another for web chats, another for internal IMs, a separate desk phone for internal calling, and then something else for email or social media or video routing,” said Jeremy Puent, product manager for Clarity Connect. “This pulls agents in many directions – which makes them less effective at customer service. It also can lead to agents being overwhelmed, which can lead to high turnover.”

“All of which makes a great case for Skype for Business as a platform for your contact center,” said Jeremy. Skype for Business was built from the ground up to support voice, IM, video, and screen sharing, all presence based. Native contact center platforms for Skype for Business can enable all of the key contact center functionality you need without duplicating the core call connectivity, media processing, and security infrastructure that SfB already provides. In addition, agents using these contact center systems only have to use one interface, simplifying their experience and ramping up their learning curve when they come on board.

The people at Clarity Connect are very aware of these industry issues, and recently integrated Facebook Messenger into their contact center product, which is native to Skype for Business. As a result, businesses can now add Messenger as a new channel to connect with their customers and have confidence those messages are being intelligently routed, queued, recorded and managed with one integrated agent experience for better customer care.

“For Clarity Connect to be able to record these interactions, whether they are on the phone, web chat, Twitter or Facebook Messenger is incredibly powerful. Based on our deep integration with Clarity Connect, customers can access these recordings from within the Virtual Observer Workforce Optimization solution and evaluate the performance of the agents – how they handled the chat, was resolution achieved on first try or did they have to switch to a different channel? From there, Virtual Observer can deliver E-learning materials to the agent based on where they may have scored poorly. Agents can then log in to the Agent Portal and play back the event and see why they were scored the way they were,” added Dan McGrail, VP of Product Management, Coordinated Systems, Inc.

Contributions to this article made possible by Jeremy Puent, Product Manager & Ian Eccleston, Marketing Manager of Clarity Connect as well as Dan McGrail. VP of Product Development of Coordinated Systems, Inc.

Coordinated Systems, Inc., (CSI) of East Hartford, CT is excited to announce the release of Virtual Observer “Workforce Optimization as a Service” for contact centers. The cloud service was developed with an Amazon Web Services infrastructure and services built on Microsoft .NET standards.

The Virtual Observer “Workforce Optimization as a Service” offering was developed to function natively within standard emerging cloud technologies. The concept of distributed computing over the internet, or simply “Cloud”, has now become a very much in demand and on-demand method for delivering Virtual Observer, traditionally an on-premise call recording, quality monitoring and workforce optimization solution for enterprises, as a service.

After extensive research, CSI decided on Amazon Web Services as the infrastructure of choice for offering cloud managed services. Amazons Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) delivers an industry leading, cost effective, high availability, Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) model, considered by many to be the most secure on the planet. Individual EC2 implementations deliver customer specific sandboxes offering just the right amount of resources componentized for each customer. Scalability is as simple as turning up or turning down resources as needed. Turn on what you need, pay for what you use, nothing more.

Staying true to a persistent streak of breakthrough features, CSI is able to deliver screen capture as well as the innovative VO live screen and webcam monitoring feature as part of the included Virtual Observer “Workforce Optimization as a Service” experience. CSI has developed a unique and unprecedented method of file transfer which minimizes the bandwidth utilized to capture large amounts of screen activity across the cloud.

The diagram below shows how Virtual Observer is installed into the enterprise to achieve a blended environment where event media (audio and video) are captured, along with enterprise metadata, and securely transmitted to the cloud using standardized secure communications.

“Our Workforce Optimization as a Service platform is extremely secure,” added Dan McGrail. CSI’s VP of Product Engineering. “Besides our own secure encrypted layers, we’re backed by the impeccable reputation of Amazon Web Services (AWS).” With the AWS cloud, not only are infrastructure headaches removed, but so are many of the security issues that come with them. AWS’s world-class, highly secure data centers utilize state-of-the art electronic surveillance and multi-factor access control systems. Data centers are staffed 24×7 by trained security guards, and access is authorized strictly on a least privileged basis. Environmental systems are designed to minimize the impact of disruptions to operations. And multiple geographic regions and Availability Zones allow you to remain resilient in the face of most failure modes, including natural disasters or system failures.

The AWS virtual infrastructure has been designed to provide optimum availability while ensuring complete customer privacy and segregation. Not only are your applications and data protected by highly secure facilities and infrastructure, but they’re also protected by extensive network and security monitoring systems. These systems provide basic but important security measures such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection and password brute-force detection on AWS Accounts. Additional security measures include:

Secure access

Built-in firewalls

Unique users

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Private Subnets

The cloud offering also allows for breakthrough pricing, in an era where traditional on-premise systems are priced for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The efficiencies of the cloud are now making it possible to implement a sophisticated, world class, enterprise-grade solution for a reasonable monthly fee, not unlike the “Salesforce” pricing model with an unprecedented economic advantage and the benefit of never needing to worry about software updates or hardware procurement. The cloud solution’s subscription-based pricing model also works within CSI’s intentions of offering the lowest cost of ownership in the WFO space, presenting an OpEx subscription model rather than a traditional CapEx model.

Virtual Observer WFO-as-a-service provides customers with a robust and scalable web-based solution where the ability to score calls or send targeted training material to staff is inherent. Richard Marcia, marketing director, said of the feature set, “the call recording and call scoring is really where the fun just begins, as you can begin to manage your center’s schedules and forecasts, run advanced query searches against indexed audio to isolate trends, and bring your agents into the quality monitoring process with their own login and the ability to respond to evaluations.”

Virtual Observer supports an entire partner ecosystem of connectors and applications, from Avaya and Cisco telephony integrations, to Salesforce’s API, to complete hosted contact center vendors. “Everything is now possible for our customers, from an end-to-end virtualized, software-only roll out, to custom integrations with their most vital contact center technologies,” Marcia added, noting “the floodgates have now opened, for unlimited, uninterrupted improvement in the contact center.”

1) Virtual Observer’s (VO) Web-based user interface is cleaner, modern and extremely easy to use, while maintaining predictive navigation and familiarity for users of the previous version. Users take to it extremely quickly.

2) VO’s latest version is equipped with Dashboard Reporting, including many pre-loaded widgets which present Average Handle Time, Employee Performance Reports, First Call Resolution data and more, in real-time drill-down charts.

3) VO’s Agent Portal module is now included with our latest version. Agent Portal brings the agent into the process, giving them the ability to log in to VO, respond to evaluations and receive E-learning tasks, collaborate with peers and more.

4) The overhauled user interface features a one-screen query wizard which allows users to easily look up the data they need quick. Users are also able to save favorite views as their own personal default views when they’re logged in.

5) Best of all, the investment in the software licensing for the 4.0 upgrade is zero dollars, as actively supported customers are able to leverage their previous investments and make the move to the new interface, paying only for the professional services time to perform the upgrade.

From version to version, the WFO software’s upgrade path has always been a painless option for customers to maintain a low cost of ownership throughout the life cycle of our software. We’ve been receiving accolades from new customers and from customers who’ve previously used competitive solutions saying “this VO is a breath of fresh air, extremely easy to use!” and “it’s great knowing we’re not being presented with what we’ve seen before from your competiton – essentially complete re-buys in years 2 and 3.”

CSI releases a new call monitoring feature which can utilize agent webcam feeds as an added security and performance measure, continuing a proud string of groundbreaking innovation with the release of the Virtual Observer (VO) VO Live webcam feature, a feature which takes agent call monitoring to an entirely new level of agent assistance.

The Virtual Observer (VO) Live Webcam is a feature that was developed from listening to our customers who wish to learn more about smart phone abuse and other distractions that lead to agent performance issues (#’s of calls per hour, out of adherence trends, fraud prevention, safety and security (reviewing what actually occurred during unplanned emergency events)).CSI is the first workforce optimization vendor to integrate web cam control with live screen monitoring. Supervisors can now use VO Live to monitor agent motion and activity, facial expressions, body language, behavior patterns, employee code of conduct and ethics.

This new feature is a logical extension of the original call monitoring goal: to make your agents the best they can possibly be. The feature, intended to be another performance tool in your contact center’s utility belt, can be enabled or disabled for environments who wish to not have web cam capabilities.